Naacp Backs Suit Against Restaurants

Cracker Barrel, the down-home-style restaurant chain with 45,000 workers at 406 stores across the country, has joined the ranks of nationwide food operations hit with race-related accusations.

At an Atlanta meeting called Tuesday by the NAACP, attorneys for a dozen current and former Cracker Barrel employees detailed a suit's claims of widespread discrimination against black workers.

Among the claims, the chain allegedly failed to hire, promote and pay black workers on the same scale as white employees.

The company quickly responded, saying that the accusations were false.

The lawsuit was filed in late July in a federal court in Rome, Ga., but officials from the NAACP, which played a key role in bringing the case, said the allegations against the firm had not been widely revealed until Tuesday. Attorneys are seeking class-action status for the suit.

The attorneys said the case against Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc., a subsidiary of Lebanon, Tenn.-based CBRL Group Inc., was based upon the experience of black workers who allegedly faced discrimination in the firm's Southeastern restaurants.

But they said the allegations were backed up by statements from workers around the country who maintained the discriminatory practices are not limited to the Southeast.

Norman Hill, a senior vice president of human resources for the restaurant chain, met with reporters after the NAACP's meeting and challenged the allegations against his firm, describing them as "false and distorted."

"I did not recognize the company that these lawyers and employees were trying to describe," Hill said in a statement. "We have minorities in the full range of positions in the company--from the dishroom to the boardroom and everything in between."

The 30-year-old company, known for its country style decor, promotes itself a provider of "good country cooking." There are 20 Cracker Barrel stores in Illinois, 20 in Indiana, 14 in Michigan, 13 in Missouri and four in Wisconsin.

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, speaking at the Atlanta meeting, said his organization spent three years investigating the accusations and preparing the lawsuit.

The lawsuit includes allegations of the use of derogatory terms for black workers by white co-workers, the concentration of black workers in jobs with no public contact, and the failure of restaurant managers to heed black workers' complaints.

At a Nashville restaurant, for example, a black worker who tried to move up from his dishwashing job was repeatedly told that no other positions were available, according to the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, less experienced white workers were promoted and given raises, the lawsuit said.

The charges against Cracker Barrel are hardly precedent-setting.

A significant case, experts said, was a 1989 class-action lawsuit against Shoney's restaurants. In 1993, the company reached a $134 million settlement in the suit, which had alleged widespread discrimination against Shoney's black employees.

And in a widely publicized 1994 case, the Denny's restaurant chain reached an agreement with the NAACP and Justice Department to hire more minority managers and to award more franchises to minorities.

Denny's also paid $45.7 million to settle black customers' claims that they had been discriminated against. Earlier this year, Denny's launched a $2 million media campaign aimed at combating racist attitudes.

Several factors appear to explain the spurt in such cases.

One is the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which allowed victims of workplace discrimination to seek damages beyond lost wages, according to a recent study by the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Another, experts say, is the arrival of a new generation of workers and customers unwilling to accept deeply entrenched racist attitudes at the workplace and from behind the restaurant counter.

So, too, the success of each case has tended to spur others.

"When you have discrimination taking place, and people compare their own meager resources to major national corporations', they tend to be discouraged. But if they see others do it successfully, it encourages them to take on the wrongdoing," said Richard Seymour, head of the Washington-based Employment Discrimination Project for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law.

Indeed, the willingness of private attorneys to take on such racial discrimination cases has been a critical factor, according to Seymour and others.

"A lot of attorneys would take these cases on and lose, or they would only get a small recovery," said Barry Goldstein, an attorney in Oakland who took part in the lawsuits against the Denny's and Shoney's restaurant chains.

"Shoney's was the first case in which lawyers outside the South not only got good results for their clients, but also made a good profit for themselves. That created the possibility for others to say, `If Barry Goldstein can do it, so can I.' "

"What I find so amazing is that so many of these practices are so ingrown. Why don't people get the message?" asked William L. Taylor, a veteran civil rights attorney in Washington, D.C.